A Military Style Travelling Field Compass

1760, 5 inch (125 mm), the Silvered Dial Signed G. Adams, London, Blue Steel Needle with Gilt ‘N/S’ and Retainer Arm on Pivot, Steeped Degree Ring, Glazed within Square Mahogany Case, hinged lid and brass hook, Fine condition.

In 1734 Adams started his own business as a maker of mathematical instruments in Fleet Street, ‘near the Castle Tavern’, a few doors from Shoe Lane, adopting the sign of Tycho Brahe’s Head. The business continued at various addresses in Fleet Street for eighty-three years.

Adams became mathematical-instrument maker to His Majesty’s Office of Ordnance, an appointment that provided an important source of income and resulted in hundreds if not thousands of commissions. In 1761, George III commissioned a large group of philosophical instruments from the London instrument-maker George Adams. The purchase sprang from a complex plan of moral education devised for Prince George in the late 1750s by the third Earl of Bute